Amazon has a book piracy problem
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At the time, ads weren't very prominent, and they were profitable for authors. I could buy them for 5 cents a click and even if only one in fifty clicks resulted in a purchase, I made money.
Now, most of the algorithmic recommendations are gone, and for many ads, Amazon suggests bids of $2.50 or more per click. Those clicks bring in money whether Amazon makes a sale or not.
To some extent, they've given up on matching customers to the best or most suitable products. Why should they work that hard if ads are more profitable?
They've also had problems with piracy and counterfeits, as mentioned in this article. I heard a radio interview with a Target executive a couple years ago where a journalist said, "Amazon is underpricing you on everything. How do you plan to stay in business?"
She said, "We vet every product on our shelves. We know who makes it and where, whether it's legit, and whether it contains lead paint and parts kids can choke on. Try to find that info on Amazon."
The reporter didn't seem too impressed at the time, but the Target woman clearly saw where things were going. As the quality, authenticity, and reliability of Amazon's merchandise has declined, people are starting to notice.
I'm not sure this is a problem they will ever have the will to fix. While they break even or lose money on genuine goods they have to ship for free, profits from third party sellers and Chinese drop shippers keep the retail operation afloat.
Sure, it's definitely possible for counterfeits to sneak into their supply chain, but that is only possible via employees or suppliers defrauding Walmart. Walmart also loses on this, so they are incentivised to audit and prevent this, since they actually hold and own the inventory. Whereas Amazon has zero incentive (or ability) to audit their supply chain, since the inventory they hold is actually owned by someone else. [aside-yes, I know that frito lay, nestle, etc actually own their inventory in Walmart and just merchandise the space]. Target definitely has moved upmarket, but even their low cost competitor has far tighter controls than Amazon.
I would even speculate that Walmart has less likelihood of counterfeits in the supply chain than target, having been tangentially involved with a vendor getting into each retailer. Walmart is incredibly mercenary with their suppliers, and due to their size they can get away with very onerous terms. I tend to dislike them for this, but I will admit I'm impressed with their supply chain management and they certainly don't leave opportunities for fraud available to their suppliers.
Id argue that the marketplace is still a strategic misstep, but I understand why they did it. Managers want to show they are keeping up with Amazon, and the only way to offer the selection they do is to allow 3rd party sellers.
However, for physical inventory in a Walmart, that is a different thing entirely. Plus, who shops at Walmart online? I have family who are enamored with their online ordering (physical store pickup) and they all have complained about the 3rd party sellers. To a person, they have all said 'if I want to have stuff shipped to me, why wouldn't I use Amazon?'
Amazon is currently banking on their generous return policy and favorable customer service. Most of what they sell is available on AliExpress, but good luck returning something ordered direct from Ali. I don't want to speculate on Amazon's downfall, since they have a dominant enough position to coast for decades, but it seems to me they are making fundamental business mistakes. Most of my peers treat them as a place to order cheap crap, I get the feeling that consumer sentiment is that stuff ordered fron Amazon is even lower quality than Walmart. But direct to door is convenient, and they have enough inertia to last a long time before failing.
Amazon is currently recommending me shower heads and bathroom hardware from when I remodeled a month ago because I bought that stuff then. Pointless.
For now, you can look for books based on Wikipedia topic (I analyze them using NLP/ML to find connections), or via another favorite book or author. At the heart of everything is 5,000+ authors who recommend their favorite books around a topic, theme, or mood.
You cannot get good independent advice from someone who wants to make money off you.
Having worked on it, I get that sizing packaging is a tremendously complex optimization problem that even other experienced programmers underestimate the complexity. The options for different package size grow factorially with different product selections, and it isn't possible to have every size box available in a packing station. However, it isn't an unsolvable problem to pack better. Optimizing split shipments to increase effeciency is tremendously complex, but calculating the box size needed for an order is actually pretty trivial (ignoring packing density, which is oddly often a reasonable assumption for shipping goods to the consumer). Amazon can certainly improve here, just by using routing packages to a packing station with a closer box size and having differing box sizes in each station.
I have always assumed that, given their scale, Amazon doesn't necessarily face the same price hit that a normal shopper faces when sending an oversize package. I have gotten multiple shipments from Amazon that were so oversize that, at my company's shipping pricing, would likely result in a net loss due to shipping cost. However, I suspect that Amazon has negotiated rates that insulate them from this, and the shipping companies take a loss on individual packages to gain the volume.
I also just found this except in the opposite direction. I wanted an ebook version of a paperback book. The publisher has paper and electronic versions of all of their books, but somehow clicking Kindle version of Book A is linked to a Kindle version of Book B... and apparently a Kindle version of Book A just isn't available on Amazon.
I ended up buying the ebook from the publisher's site directly, which came in mobi, epub, and pdf formats. I thought "oh, I'll just drop this into the Kindle app so my notes and highlights will sync across devices". I was shocked to discover that's not even really possible with a third party purchased ebook. Eventually I gave up on that and just used the PDF edition and made notes in highlights in Preview after the Kindle macOS app and Kindle iOS apps lost all of my notes and highlights trying to sync twice.
No matter where you go and what you do, Amazon wins, lol.
There's https://www.indiebound.org/ at least, which lets you search the inventory of local bookstores.
I've also had good luck ordering used books from https://www.thriftbooks.com/ instead of Amazon.
Have I received items that were crap? Sure, because I chose to go with the noname item from the random seller for cost reasons. If it’s unusable I just return it.
That said, I don’t think I have even a 1% return rate. Buy items with a few reviews and read the top reviews instead of only trusting the star system and you’ll get exactly what you paid for 99% of the time (and will get your money back the remaining 1% of the time).
At some point its about the amount of damages and if they can make a statement. Things move slow so it could be coming...
I remember getting obviously burned DVDs run through terrible label makers back in the day. Now they're copying all the the art and packaging for box sets.
I'm both impressed at the work they put in, and also confused why they occasionally leave obvious errors like typos on the box after all that work.
Here's my original Tweet thread about it: https://twitter.com/davekopec/status/1302578592552022018
Here's the Hacker News discussion about it: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24399301
Amazon tries to "unify" pages for products that are "the same", which ends up being a disaster.
A while ago I found that the page for Husain Haddawy's translation of the Arabian Nights was linked to a "Kindle version" of an entirely different work (also an edition of the "Arabian Nights", but there's a lot of room for variation in e.g. what's included, to say nothing of the translator). After some very annoying searching, I discovered that this was true even though Amazon was already selling a Kindle version of the Husain Haddawy translation. Getting this fixed didn't require emailing Jeff Bezos - a conversation with frontline customer support on the website did the job.
But the same problem exists all over Amazon. Try following the link to the "Kindle version" of any edition of Romance of the Three Kingdoms and you will discover a random, unrelated edition. If you follow the link back to a physical copy, you'll find a third edition. Read the reviews for any movie or TV show and you will see that they combine reviews of every DVD, Blu-ray, streaming, and probably VHS release.
This should be the top (and only IMO) priority of CC enforcement instead of going after sci-hub and the like.
> We find that almost all books, regardless of category, peak in the first 15 weeks after publication
https://epjdatascience.springeropen.com/articles/10.1140/epj...
A graph with sales per week/week after publication
https://media.springernature.com/lw685/springer-static/image...
Seems that 2 years after publication the number of copies sold per week declines by two orders of magnitude compared to the peak.
To me, 5-7 years seems reasonable for technology inventions (patents), 7-10 years for books and other art.
Stephen Breyer, the recently retired Supreme Court Justice, wrote an interesting article in 1970 back when he was a law professor about that, called "The Uneasy Case for Copyright".
In it he argued that cut-rate copies swamping the market did not actually happen historically. Books made most of their money fairly shortly after publication. Copying technology was slow enough that by the time someone could get copies made and distributed there wasn't much market left for the book anyway. (Also, there weren't huge booksellers with massive inventory, or book on demand services, further making it harder for a book to get much sales after the first printing).
Now copying technology is a lot faster, and we do have huge booksellers like Amazon and book on demand services and we have ebooks so there is pretty much no cost to keeping a book available indefinitely, and so most of Breyer's points are no longer applicable even if they were possibly correct in the 19th and much of the 20th centuries.
Theoretically there is a 100 years copyright on StarCraft but I doubt a lot of people will buy it on GoG in 2050.
I intensely dislike the paid search results or sponsored recommendations. The nonsense-name brands that are either chinese or secretly amazon that prevent brand names from showing up (and many good brands ship counterfeits). The fake reviews. The popup "extended warranty" screens where if you close the tab/window... the item doesn't make it to your shopping basket.
I remember when I had an iphone, and a few years ago when apple did not prevent abuse I just stopped installing apps. The app market had jumped the shark and become a cesspool.
Nice apps I liked were bought and monetized in unethical ways, and apple didn't care.
For example, I had an app called gas cubby, which let me locally - on the phone - keep track of all my vehicles. I could enter detailed information about each car such as year, make, model, vin, insurance policy, gas purchases, oil changes and the like. It would tell you gas mileage and remind you of upcoming maintenance.
One day, the app was updated and all my local data was uploaded to the cloud!
Another app, camscanner plus purchased by tencent basically did the same thing.
It doesn't feel like a platform problem, more of a societal fabric unraveling.
What do you call this, the Rugpull Economy?
I've actually shifted to just using Microsoft's Office Lens for scanning - I'd purchased the paid versions of multiple scanning apps and about 6-7 years ago I looked and every one of them seemed to be owned by a company in Russia. I wasn't real comfortable with that, so switched over to Microsoft. It may be a faceless megacorp, but I still think it's more trustworthy than anonymous Russian entities dealing with uploads and OCRs of stuff I think worth keeping.
It recognizes the document, finds the edges and makes a .pdf file.
It actually kind of sucks compared to the other apps, and notes will upload to the cloud if you don't prevent it, but it can be local and not china.
However Amazon and AWS isn't about doing a good job, it's about doing a mediocre job and making everyone happy though apologies.
And that's why I'm still using them. They are a good balance.
Cost goes against resilience and quality. You can automate things to a limit until everything breaks down.
If it’s not more convenient or cheaper, and you’re not getting value from the space existing then you might as well just buy from Amazon.
It’s like some people got “buy local” hammered into their brains without any thought as to when doing so is actually beneficial.
Buying from a local independent bookstore is good for more than just supporting them for providing a community space. Buying from your local bookstore also means giving your money (at least in part) to members within your local economy.
It also means not giving your money (at least in part) to Amazon.
Both of those things are a win.
I know a few 6-7 figure authors who only sell from their own store. (Not that this prevents someone from posting their content on Amazon).
All of this is to say that the idea of pirated books proliferating on Amazon is entirely feasible if electronic devices can be so successfully faked. However, what's not lost on me is the irony of Amazon, a marketplace whose initial success was anchored by trust in its ability to deliver books, falling victim to such schemes in this specific market space.
Google and Amazon could solve this sort of piracy in a week of they wanted to...
Of course, the counterfeit seller can just create a new account, and then it becomes a game of whack-a-mole, but perhaps that could be grounds for a lawsuit against Amazon directly, for failing to rein in all the copyright infringement occurring on their platform. (Maybe even a class action, since this problem seems widespread.)
Again, I'm sure this isn't easy or fun (or cheap) to do, but tweeting at people to not buy your book from Amazon seems to be... not all that useful a response?
Amazon surely knows what they are doing. They don't care that brands are diluted or merchandise is authentic. Because that just ensures people trust AmazonBasics that much more. There are no downsides for Amazon.
There's an argument that came out of the Copyright Office a few years ago that DMCA 512 has been grossly misinterpreted by the courts. You see, because 512 immunity only applies to things done "at the direction of the user", the courts have decided that social media recommendation engines can be immunized from suit through the 512 safe harbor. However, if that same curation is done by a human instead of an automated system, then it's no longer "at the direction of the user"[0], and the site is a publisher rather than a platform. This is absolutely bananas and I can think of no other part of law where deliberately ignoring the crime or tort makes it less criminal or tortious.
If the Copyright Office had its way, both of these activities - automated and manual curation - would take you out of your safe harbor. YouTube could host your videos, like Vimeo's pro tier, but it couldn't put them in search or on the home page unless it was willing to take on your copyright risk. Shopify could run your online store but you couldn't sell your products on Amazon.
There's been other proposals to change the process by which companies get their safe harbor, too. The EU got rid of notice-and-takedown and replaced it with license[1]-and-notice-and-filtering. The criteria for who has to abide by the new system is very roughly the same "do they curate" standard the US Copyright Office wanted put into DMCA 512, with online marketplaces - among other things - explicitly exempted from the requirements. So now our dichotomy becomes a trichotomy of "host" (no liability), "platform" (must license and filter), and "publisher" (full liability).
I'm not sure if the EU will ultimately be able to thread the needle on this. We haven't seen the full effects of EUCD Article 17 yet, but my gut instinct is that it both goes too far (targeted platforms will be overregulated) and not far enough (copyright holders will still have horrific piracy problems).
[0] See Mavrix v. LiveJournal
[1] This is technically a "best effort" standard - you are not required to actually obtain a license, since copyright holders could otherwise just refuse you one. However, unlike IETF standards, those words do not mean "lowest effort" in law. Serving EU regulators a water sandwich will likely not go well with them.
Speaks to a larger problem as well, the excuses platforms make to not do due diligence when it comes to what is being sold and the lack of ability to talk to a real person on the other end quickly.
Happy to answer any questions. (Or discuss technical book authoring in general).
Some seller was downloading PhD theses for free from the university, and selling the as ebooks.
They uploaded thousands of theses across several large fields.
It lead to the university taking legal action to remove all infringing material off of Amazon.
Then there’s finances. When a publisher pays you an advance on royalties, if your book never sells enough to earn those royalties, you will not have to pay back the advance (although, for a two-book deal, it might reduce the effective amount of money you get on the second book, depending on how the contract is written, which is why a good agent is necessary). The publisher shoulders all the production, editing, distribution and publicity costs. With a recording contract, all the costs of recording are deducted from the artist’s royalties and many bands have had a hit record where they ended up owing the record company money. And for all of that, as noted above, the record company claims ownership of the recording that the band paid for.
TV/movie production ends up being somewhere between the two. Not as exploitative as the record companies, not as genteel as the publishers.